Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Graphene monolayers are one-atom-thick planar sheets of sp2-bonded carbon atoms with unique physical properties. This material is of interest for high speed integrated circuits, flexible displays, solar cells, and many other scientific and technological applications. However, many such applications may be dependent on graphene with a low defect density. One approach for producing large films of single layer graphene is chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on copper substrates. It has been demonstrated that CVD graphene grown on a 99.8% pure copper substrate may produce more than ten times the number of defects compared to CVD graphene grown on a 99.999% pure copper substrate. Unfortunately 99.999% pure copper may cost approximately ten to one hundred times that of 99.8% copper. Since the copper is etched away in the fabrication process, the value of the purity may be lost even though the copper may be reclaimed.
The present disclosure appreciates that improving the quality of CVD graphene may be a complex undertaking.